Current e-commerce systems and methods provide consumers and businesses the ability to browse product lines and consummate sales transactions. However, current e-commerce systems do not allow for easy customization of the needed functionality to facilitate the transaction. While current systems can be customized for a specific business or customer, the customization is a time consuming and complicated task. These customizations must generally be hard coded into the application by the developers, thereby incurring increases in costs, delay in implementation, and loss of productivity. In the field of procurement, for example, an organization in need of a product or service generally has contractual relationships with multiple vendors to provide the desired product or service. The contractual relationship may define such terms as price, lot size, form of delivery, amount of discount, and other business rules. These rules may become complex as one term may influence other terms, such as different levels of discounts based on the number of items ordered.
Procurement systems also generally require order authorization from a procurement officer of the organization or someone in charge of reviewing the orders for compliance with internal policies of the organization, in addition to the contractual relationships with the vendors. These orders must be processed and tracked as the orders progress through the approval process such that the individuals placing orders are notified of whether the order was approved or denied, as well as for internal audit purposes.
Furthermore, procurement system also do not currently provide features that would allow users to: create new items that may not already be available to them for ordering, and permit such new items to be ordered by other users of the organization as well; create new user-customized forms for accessing items and, specifically, for searching for items and ordering; define new user-customized searchable item attributes; and, dynamically manage procurement contracts when amendments are made after contract execution, or certain contractual events (e.g., rebates or price reductions) occur that the parties (e.g., buyer organization and supplier) should be notified about. Therefore, there is a need for a system and method that can provide an efficient and simple procurement process that is easily customizable for multiple organizations and multiple vendors with simple and complex business terms, and can also provide a single point-of-access for both businesses and consumers to interface, interact, and implement and execute transactions, in accordance with existing or newly defined relationships, using a custom and configurable methodology for realizing their requirements.